Goldman Sachs Tells A Tour-Giving Employee: "Choose Us Or The Tour"

Tom Comerford was recently asked to stop working for Goldman Sachs because he was giving tours around New York’s financial district and describing Goldman’s products as “crap,” says the Guardian.

For a while, Comerford was living a double life (the “graphics department”).

By night he worked in Goldman’s document production division. By day, he worked for Andrew Luan, a former Deutsche Bank trader who started the “Wall Street Experience” tour, introducing tourists to buildings like AIG’s offices, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor’s, showing them how the financial crisis happened step by step.

He would even hand out to tourists a CDO document as an example of a real, life toxic asset he called, “crap.”

When Goldman found out about his tours and the name-calling, Comerford says he was called by the firm’s compliance department.

“They were very concerned at the tone of it,” says Comerford. “They thought that if anybody could possibly, in any way, shape or form, interpret the tour negatively, I couldn’t do it.”

“He was told that given the nature of the tours he was giving, we’d like him not to do it. Being very deprecating about the industry while claiming to be an employee of one of the organisations within it seemed to be inconsistent. Here he is, advertising himself as a Goldman employee and talking about producing subprime mortgage securities as ‘crap’.”

He chose the tours.

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